The Importance of Talent!

To remain competitive in the current business climate, you must attract, develop, nurture and inspire talented employees to ensure they remain within your company to meet current and future demands.

It is no longer enough to identify talent once they have been hired and worked for your company for a period of time.   

Identifying talent must begin with the detailed assessment of applicants during the selection and recruitment phase. It is at this time that desirable competencies and skills such as the ability to influence, divergent thinking, problem solving abilities and a strong motivation to learn and be successful will become apparent.

Talented individuals are driven. They want to achieve the best results in the most efficient way possible and often view challenges as opportunities to think more innovatively. Top performers are motivated by others like them, leading to stronger collaboration and higher-functioning teams. This fosters a bolder vision for your organisation and will impact the bottom line in a beneficial way.  Imaginative ideas which facilitate business growth and customer satisfaction will create enhanced productivity and profitability. This underscores the importance of attracting talent. If you can match such desirable qualities with the right position and align a team of like-minded thinkers, business outcomes will improve exponentially. 

First step! Discover what engages high performers so you can create an environment that is aligned to their needs and elicits their best qualities.

Research has found the factors which impact high performers the most are:

•             Employee autonomy
•             Risk Taking
•             Tolerance of mistakes
•             Open Communication
•             Good supervisory relationships
•             Education and training opportunities

Second step! Identify the organisational factors which influence an organisations ability to retain top performers. Research has highlighted that factors associated with retaining talent are:

•             A change driven organisation culture

•             High degree of organisational flexibility

•             Agile and innovative work culture

•             Strong leadership and vision

A final remark! It is possible to train an employee on any product or service. You cannot train someone to have integrity, resilience, self-confidence and work ethic!  So consider how you might assess the presence of such attributes reliably and objectively during the recruitment process. 

The two most favoured approaches are via interview or personality assessment, but with them emphasis on reliably and objectively, it may be more defensible to gather such data as strong hypotheses via a personality assessment and then validate these competencies via structured interviewdo yourself and your business a favour and start incorporating personality assessment into your recruitment strategy. The benefits of gaining talented employees will help your organisation stay aligned and to the organisations strategic mission!  

As in the organisation may well have decided what competence achieve success and set it apart from competitors, whilst the HR strategy might be to align a competency based HR approach with the corporate strategy.

3 steps to achieving your 2015 career goals

There is an old saying about succeeding that I’m sure we’ve all heard hundreds of times, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” It’s a handy reminder about the importance of sticking to a plan, and today we’d like to take that a little further to help you realise, record, and achieve your career goals for 2015. Many of you may wish to receive a new role this year, or maybe some kind of promotion, or you might just like to make some new friends in the workplace. Whatever your objectives are, we have put together 3 important tips to stick to in order to make it happen!

1) Realise what you want

It’s very easy to change your mind about what you’d like to get out of your job when you’re in the thick of it. If you’d have a tough week you may want more work-life balance. If you’ve been getting things done quickly you may like more work and a pay rise. It’s best to have some moments to yourself outside of the workplace to reflect on your job as a whole and where it can take you in the long run.

Do:

·         Write down outcomes that would make you more satisfied at work

·         Take into account some advice from people in similar or senior roles

Don’t:

·         Concentrate on what you think you should be doing, or what others expect of you. Set goals that mean something to you and relate to what you want to achieve

2) Record and share your goals

Once you’ve decided on some outcomes you feel would contribute to your overall satisfaction and direction you’d like your career to take, it’s time to ‘formalise’ this commitment and write it down in a logical way. It’s good to remember the ‘SMART’ criteria. That is, that you need your goal/s to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. This way, you won’t alter or forget your intentions in 6 month’s time.

Example: “By October, I want the extra tasks I’m taking on this year to be giving enough value to the business that I am rewarded with a 10% pay increase.”

The sharing aspect of this is what can make some people nervous; most people would not comfortably approach their colleagues or employer with their career goals. However, if you’d like to achieve a change you will need to spark up the conversation at some stage anyway, so letting key people know that you’re serious about your role can be very positive so long as you consider their needs. Other people to involve are your family, friends and partner, as they can check in with you to see how your goals are going.

3) Action plan, review, repeat          

This is both the most overlooked and the most important part of a career related goal. Having one sentence can be great, but if you haven’t given yourself a realistic impetus to get it done it could drag on far longer than intended or not happen at all. An action plan will allow you to achieve the smaller parts of a larger idea so that you’re getting closer and closer each month.

Do:

·         Write down tasks to do each month that will add to your goal

·         Save alert reminders in your calendar – from things to ask other staff members, research for you to do in your spare time and other actions to undertake

·         Read back on your previous plans at regular intervals

Don’t:

·         Rush. This could make a tremendous difference to how you work and how you feel about your job

·         Stop until your action plan is complete. While unexpected obstacles can delay you from reaching your goals, simply revise your plan and timeline then continue moving forward.

Hopefully these tips give you the groundwork for a realistic career plan. Many businesses and employers today put in minimal time to plan your career for you, so you need to take the reins and make sure it happens according to your values!